I had this empty
feeling when I left the theater after watching Martin Scorcese’s biopic about
Howard Hughes, The Aviator. It wasn’t the worst movie I had ever seen.
In fact as movies go it was fairly good. I went because the reviewer at Chronicles recommended it. He
kept referring to it in the same breath as Citizen Kane, and I suppose
that was at least one of the movies Scorcese had in mind when the decided to
take on a larger than life figure like Howard Hughes. The special effects were
great, but all Hollywood movies have great
special effects. In fact, a possible definition of a Hollywood movie could be a
film with great special effects but a defective plot, which could also serve as
a good definition of life in America.
But why did I have this sense of eerie incoherence when the final credits
started rolling up the screen? Why was keeping me from dismissing The
Aviator as just a more factual version of Star Wars, the ultimate
American movie, one which is all special effects and no plot whatsoever.

In order to plumb my perplexity, I
began to reassemble the movie in my mind. If it’s about anything, The
Aviator is an anatomy of Hughes’ madness. Hughes screws lots of beautiful
women but ends up worrying about germs on doorknobs. He produces films and
builds airplanes but ends up a naked recluse in a room covered with the tissues
he uses to touch potentially germ-laden objects. He beats Pan Am at their own
corrupt game, but he shuffles around his room in wearing shoe boxes for shoes.
At one point, after Kate Hepburn leaves him, he burns all his clothes. In order
to make a stab at explaining all of this bizarre behavior, Scorcese begins the
movie by treating us to a scene of little Howard being bathed by his mother,
who warns him he is not safe because of all the germs out there. The key to
understanding Hughes’ madness, in other words, is Freud. Howard was too
attached to his mother. He wanted to kill his father and marry his mother.
Because of this he was afraid of germs and went mad.

If you find that explanation
implausible, so do I. It has all of the earmarks of a Hollywood
explanation, i.e., something imposed from without by a universally recognized
authority which really has nothing to do with the plot it is supposed to
explain (or, in the case of Freud, any other plot as well, including Oedipus
Rex). The answer to this riddle is in the biographies which Scorcese pillages
to make his film. I will be honest with you though. Like some heroic Oedipus, I
solved the Hughes riddle before we got home from the theater, simply by adding
up what Scorcese threw into the movie but did not explain. What do compulsive
womanizing and compulsive handwashing have in common? What is the link between
hearing loss, fear of germs, grandiose projects like the Spruce Goose, whose
one hundred yard leap into the air provides the climax to the film, and
madness. The answer is obvious for anyone with eyes to see, namely, syphilis.
Howard Hughes had syphilis. Martin Scorcese has made a movie about syphilis
without once mentioning the disease. He has done the biographical version of
King Kong without the monkey.

To get back to the film, the
clothes-burning incident is in Charles Higham’s biography The Secret Life of
Howard Hughes, which is evidently where Scorcese got it, but with one small
difference. Hughes, in the process of throwing all of his clothes into a fire,
is interrupted by one of his employees, who asks if he can have Hughes’ leather
jacket before he destroys it. “Not unless you want to get syphilis,” Hughes
answers. Once we add the word syphilis to The Aviator, the story of
Hughes’ life suddenly makes sense. People who are afraid of picking up germs
from doorknobs do not engage in promiscuous sex, but if we put the incidents in
Hughes’ life in their proper causal relationship, it is easy to see that
someone who contracted a venereal disease through promiscuous sexual intercourse
might then become afraid of all physical contact as a result. Hughes’
compulsive handwashing just seems crazy in Scorcese’ re-enactment of his life,
but obsessive compulsive disorder makes sense in light of syphilis, even in the
absence of a deteriorating brain, one of the symptoms of tertiary syphilis.

This brings us to the next question.
Why did Martin Scorcese, who was reportedly furious over the fact that he got
passed over once again when the Oscar for best director went to Clint Eastwood,
wreck his own story by leaving out the only element that could make sense of
Hughes’ life? We have dealt with related questions before. Fifteen years ago
(see “Marty’s Christ,” Fidelity, November 1989), I did a long article on
Scorcese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ. At that time the question
was, why does Martin Scorcese want to make Jesus Christ look like a pathetic
loser, a man not unlike the character Travis Bickle, played by Robert de Niro
in Scorcese’s early film Taxi Driver. The answer to that question is
fairly simple. Scorcese had just broken up with his third wife at the time; he
had just finished his “rockumentary” The Last Waltz and had moved in
with the main character in that documentary Jaime “Robbie” Robertson of The
Band, and the two of them were conducting marathon drug and sex orgies in their
Bel Air, California home. Scorcese, the man who was a Catholic seminarian in
his youth, found that portraying Christ as a pathetic loser who had an affair
with Mary Magdalene and then forced her into a life of prostitution by jilting
her was consoling. Why? Because if Christ was an idiot, why should Scorcese
feel bad about rejecting his teaching?

The situation with The Aviator
is not quite so simple. Jesus Christ is simply an empty vessel onto which
Scorcese projects his guilty conscience. Scorcese obviously relates
sympathetically to Hughes’ womanizing, but there is no indication that Scorcese
has syphilis as far as I know. Why then the suppression of this fact? The
suppression is especially telling in the light of the Hollywood
ethos of full disclosure, the rationale that was used to break the production
code in the ‘60s. “It’s part of life,” the codebreakers used to tell Joe Breen
throughout the ‘50s. Breen replied by saying that the bowel movement he had
everyday was part of life too, but no one was proposing to make a movie out of
it. Hollywood, we are told in just about every
history of the film industry in America,
needed to break away from the oppressive censorship of Catholics like Production
Code enforcer Joe Breen so that they could make films that were true to life.

Well, 40 years after the code got
broken, Hollywood is still involved in censorship, but now it is not obscenity
which gets censored, it is the idea that “actions have consequences,” to
paraphrase Richard Weaver. Scorcese can’t bring himself to admit, in his film,
that Howard Hughes screwed a lot of women, contracted syphilis and went crazy,
but he can’t completely avoid making that statement either. As a result, he
simply wrecks his own story. Why is he drawn to Hughes’ life if he can’t
portray it as it was? Why did Jonathan Harker in Dracula, another book
about syphilis, say to Minna after he had spent a night with three strange
women in Dracula’s castle, “Here is my diary. Do not read it.”? Because, as I
said in Monsters
from the Id, some things are too painful to talk about but too painful
not to talk about as well. The suppression of moral causality on a scale of
this magnitude proves what truly moral creatures we are, but in a perverse way.

The Aviator
was especially interesting in light of one of the less-acclaimed biopics of the
same year, namely, Kinsey, starring a generally wooden and glum Liam Neeson.
(If you had to face a script like Kinsey, you would be glum too.) Alfred
Kinsey is portrayed as a courageous scientist who had the courage to pursue his
studies and break irrational sexual taboos. The Kinsey you get in Kinsey
is essentially the guy featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1953
when the female volume came out. This is the man who champions “diversity,”
because in nature there is nothing but diversity, something Kinsey concluded by
studying gall wasps. Or by engaging in homosexual behavior. Of course, that
Kinsey was never mentioned in Time, largely because every article that
got written on him was personally vetted by Kinsey himself, often after he took
the sexual history of the reporter. Blackmail is a theme which goes unmentioned
in Kinsey, but it informs the Kinsey story every bit as much as syphilis
informs The Aviator.

There is, of course, a syphilis
sequence in Kinsey. I have talked with nurses who graduated from IndianaUniversity who were forced
to watch films of syphilitic prostitutes having sex. They were forced to watch
these films largely because of Kinsey’s influence at IU as part of their
education. Just what medical benefit they derived from this is hard to say
although it should be perfectly clear that propaganda of this sort certainly
broke down any resistance they might have had to what Professor Kinsey, the
disinterested scientist who happened to be obsessed with homosexual eroticism,
might have had to say. If it did nothing else, the film derailed any objections
they might have had to Kinsey’s idea of “diversity” as the bedrock of human
life.

It is the bad sex educator in Kinsey
who shows films about syphilis, and we know he is a bad person because he drags
morals into his sex ed course. He is bad because he proposes “abstinence” as
the best prophylactic against syphilis. Kinsey, of course, promotes penicillin,
even though at the time of the sex ed course, which is to say in the ‘30s, it
was not available to IU students or anyone else for that matter. Deb Hayden, who
has written a book on syphilis which was reviewed in these pages, says that
“What constitutes adequate treatment” of syphilis “remains an open question
since spirochetes shed round bodies that can appear as active spirochetes later
in a cycle. Tissue from rabbits treated with penicillin and then injected into
healthy rabbits can cause syphilis. The concept of ‘cure’ at any stage of the
disease is controversial.” So much for penicillin as Kinsey’s silver bullet.
Kinsey is the good sex educator because he attacks morality as out of place in
this area of life. “We have technology; we don’t need morals,” is not something
Kinsey says in the movie, but the movie is suffused with that idea because it
is one of the primary myths of both the Enlightenment (as proclaimed by the
Marquis de Sade) and the American version of it which uprooted traditional
American mores and morals in the years following World War II.

Syphilis was decertified as a moral
cautionary tale by penicillin, long before the same thing happened to AIDS. In
fact the whole AIDS virus myth, created at a news conference by Margaret
Heckler in 1984, was precisely the syphilis story extrapolated to another
disease. The virus was convenient in this regard because it let homosexuals off
the hook of their behavior, which was the real reason they were dying. Polite
people did not say that the wages of sin were death in the context of AIDS,
which was real enough as a form of self-induced poisoning among homosexuals
even if it wasn’t caused by a virus. Syphilis is mentioned in Kinsey and
banned from The Aviator for the same reason—to break its link to moral
causality.

And why is moral causality so repugnant
to Hollywood?
Because it is the only thing that allows people to make sense out of their
lives. Hollywood
is in the business of control through entertainment. Morality is the opposite
of that. It is autonomy through restraint. Hollywood’s
main weapon against moral causality is pornography in its various forms because
passion short-circuits reason and provides the simplest form of control. But
their lust to dominate goes beyond that. The thread that leads Theseus out of
the labyrinth of his own passion is practical reason, which is another word for
morality. Syphilis was a moral tale that got decertified in two different ways
in two different movies. Which shows how important it is to those who are
willing to wreck their stories and lose Oscars by not mentioning it.

At this point, it might be appropriate
to mention successful cures, not to syphilis but to what causes syphilis,
namely, movies. The antidote to Hollywood
used to be known as the pledge, not the Alcohol pledge (although it was
similar) but the Legion of Decency pledge not to see obscene movies. The Legion
of Decency Pledge was the teeth in the production code. I’ve written about its
demise in John
Cardinal Krol and the Cultural Revolution. The pledge is based on the
premise of moral causality, the one premise which Hollywood
goes out of its way to deny, even if it means wrecking perfectly good stories
that could earn lots of money. As Larry Dickson has pointed out, an oath is the
only thing that most people have. The only oath of any significance left in our
culture is the marriage vow, which is undermined by Hollywood
because Hollywood
wants to weaken and control people by robbing their lives of moral
significance. The pledge is the one thing Hollywood
feared in the past, and it is something they can learn to fear again. The details
still need to be worked out, but a pledge of total abstinence when it comes to
television might be a good place to start.